She looked at him nonplussed.
“I wasn’t born in America. In point of fact, I wasn’t even born. But I work for our government because I believe in America. I hap-pen to believe that this is a unique society. We have a unique role in the world.”
Oscar whacked the lab table with an open hand. “We invented the future! We built it! And if they could design or market it a little better than we could, then we just invented something else more amazing yet. If it took imagination, we always had that. If it took enterprise, we always had it. If it took daring and even ruthlessness, we had it — we not only built the atomic bomb, we used it! We’re not some crowd of pious, sniveling, red-green Europeans trying to make the world safe for boutiques! We’re not some swarm of Confucian social engineers who would love to watch the masses chop cotton for the next two millennia! We are a nation of hands-on cosmic me-chanics!”
“And yet we’re broke,” Greta said.
“Why should I care if you clowns don’t make any money? I’m from the government! We print the money. Let’s get something straight right now. You people face a stark choice here. You can sit on your hands like prima donnas, and everything you’ve built will go down the tubes. Or you can stop being afraid, you can stop kneeling. You can get on your feet as a community, you can take some pride in yourselves. You can seize control of your own future, and make this place what you know it ought to be. You can or-ganize.”
4
Oscar was physically safe from assault inside the Col-laboratory’s Hot Zone. But harassment by random maniacs had made his life politically impossible. Rumor flashed over the local community as swiftly as fire in a spacecraft. People were avoiding him; he was trouble; he was under a curse. Under these difficult circumstances, Oscar thought it wisest to tactfully absent himself. He de-vised a scheme to cover his retreat.
Oscar took the Bambakias tour bus into the Col-laboratory’s vehicle repair shed. He had the bus repainted as a Hazardous Materials emergency response vehicle. This had been Fontenot’s suggestion, for the wily ex-fed was a master of disguise. Fontenot pointed out that very few people, even roadblockers, would knowingly interfere with the ominous bulk of a vivid yellow Haz-Mat bus. The local Collaboratory cops were delighted to see Oscar leaving their jurisdiction, so they were only too eager to supply the necessary biohazard paint and decals.
Oscar departed before dawn in the repainted cam-paign bus, easing through an airlock gate without an-nouncement or fanfare. He was fleeing practically alone. He took only an absolutely necessary skeleton retinue: Jimmy de Paulo, his driver; Donna Nunez, his stylist; Lana Rama-chandran, his secretary; and, as cargo, Moira Matarazzo.
Moira was the first in his krewe to quit. Moira was a media spokesperson by trade; she was sadly visual and verbal. Moira had never quite understood the transcendent pleasures of building hotels by hand. Moira was also deeply repelled by the hermetic world of the Collaboratory, a world whose peculiar inhabitants found her interests irrelevant. Moira had decided to resign and go home to Boston.
Oscar made no real effort to persuade Moira to stay on with his krewe. He’d thought the matter over carefully, and he couldn’t accept the risk of keeping her around. Moira had grown fatally bored. He knew he could no longer trust her. Bored people were just too vul-nerable.
Oscar’s trip had been designed to achieve his political goals, while simultaneously throwing off pursuit and assault by armed luna-tics. He would circuit, disguised and unannounced, through Louisi-ana, Washington, DC, and back home to Boston in time for Christmas — all the while maintaining constant net-contact with his krewe in Buna.
Oscar’s first planned stop was Holly Beach, Louisiana. Holly Beach was a seaside collection of rickety stilt housing on the Gulf Coast, a hurricane-wracked region rashly billing itself as “The Cajun Riviera.” Fontenot had made arrangements for Oscar’s visit, scoping out the little town and renting a beach house under cover ID. Accord-ing to Fontenot, who was waiting there to join them, the ramshackle tourist burg was perfect for clandestine events. Holly Beach was so battered and primitive that it lacked net-wiring of any kind; it lived on cellphones, sat dishes, and methane generators. In rnid-December — it was now December 19 — the seaside village was almost deserted. The likelihood of being taped by paparazzi or jumped by insane assassins was very low in Holly Beach.
Oscar had arranged a quiet rendezvous there with Dr. Greta Pen-ninger.
After this beach idyll, Oscar would forge on to Washington, where he was overdue for face-time with his fellow staffers on the Senate Science Committee. After making the necessary obeisances to the Hill rats, Oscar would take the tour bus north to Cambridge, and finally deliver it to the Massachusetts Federal Democrat party HQ. Bambakias would donate his campaign bus to the party. The Senator, always a stalwart party financial patron, would at last be free to write off his investment.
Once in Boston, Oscar would renew his ties to the Senator. He would also have a welcome chance to return home and reorder his domestic affairs. Oscar was very worried about his house. Clare had deserted the place and left for Europe, and it wasn’t right or safe to have his home sitting empty. Oscar imagined that Moira might house-sit his place while she looked for another job in Boston. Oscar was far from happy about either the house or Moira, but the house and Moira were two of the loosest ends that he had. It struck him as handy to knit them.
Time passed smoothly on the trip’s first leg, to southwest Louisi-ana. Oscar had Jimmy turn up the music, and while Moira sulked in her bunk with a romance novel, Oscar, Lana, and Donna passed their time debating the many potentials of Greta Penninger.
Oscar wasn’t shy about this subject. There wasn’t much sense in that. It was useless to attempt to hide his love affairs from his own krewe. Certainly they had all known about Clare from the beginning. They might not be entirely thrilled about the advent of Greta, but it was spectator sport.
And their discussion had a political point. Greta Penninger was the leading dark-horse candidate for the Collaboratory Director’s post. Strangely, the Collaboratory scientists seemed oblivious to the stark fact that their Director’s post was at risk. The scientists weren’t fully cognizant of their own situation, somehow — they would refer to their power structure as “collegial assessment,” or maybe the “succession process” — anything but “politics.” But it was politics, all right. The Collaboratory seethed with a form of politics that dared not speak its own name.
This was not to say that science itself was politics. Scientific knowledge was profoundly different from political ideology. Science was an intellectual system producing objective data about the nature of the universe. Science involved falsifiable hypotheses, reproducible re-sults, and rigorous experimental verification. Scientific knowledge it-self wasn’t a political construct, any more than element 79 in the periodic table was a political construct.
But the things people did with science were every bit as political as the things people did with gold. Oscar had devoted many fascinated hours to study of the scientific community and its weirdly orthogonal power structure. The genuine work of science struck him as sadly geekish and tedious, but he was always charmed by an arcane political arrangement.
A scientist with many citations and discoveries had political power. He had scholarly repute, he had academic coattails, he had clout. He could dependably make his voice heard within the science community. He could set agendas, staff conference panels, arrange promotions and travel junkets, take consultation work. He could stay comfortably ahead of the research curve by receiving works before their official publication. A scientist on this inside track had no army, police, or slush fund; but in that quiet yet deadly scientific fashion, he was in firm control of his society’s basic resources. He could shunt the flow of opportunity at will, among the lesser beings. He was a player.